Streamlining Patient Care: A Dataset to Train AI in Writing Hospital Stay Summaries

Hospitals use brief hospital course (BHC) summaries to record patient stays. These summaries are typically created manually by clinical staff. Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in automating various tasks, but their use in healthcare, especially for generating BHCs from clinical notes, hasn't been fully explored. To address this, a new preprocessed dataset called MIMIC-IV-BHC has been created. This dataset pairs clinical notes with their corresponding BHC summaries. The intent is to help adapt LLMs to this specific healthcare summarization task.Researchers have also benchmarked the performance of two general-purpose LLMs and three healthcare-adapted LLMs. This benchmark gives us a better understanding of how well these models can summarize patient stays. Imagine if AI could take over this task, freeing up medical professionals to focus on more critical aspects of patient care. However, the real test is how accurately these models can understand and translate complex clinical jargon into clear and concise summaries. Healthcare data is sensitive and mistakes can have serious consequences. While the potential is promising, it's crucial to ensure these models are both reliable and ethical in their summarization.